fandoms are fascinating things

[smg01]

A couple of people on my flist have linked to the Ms.Scribe Story which I've started reading. It is indeed engrossing. datawhorevoyeur have you come across this yet? It seems like something right up your alley.

One of the things that's interesting to me is that there seems to be an inevitability to the life cycles of online communities. It begins, everyone is excited, fresh, "young." It's the best community ever. We all love each other and will be BFF. We're the bestest of the best. Then come the disputes, the fractures, the cliques. Subcommunities form. Offences are taken. Charges of elitism are made. Power positions--real or more likely imagined--are identitied. Frauds, the obnoxious, and the just plain weird come onto the scene. Everyone laments the good old days, which may or may not have been as golden as memory makes them. And eventually people start moving on to new communities that are fresh and exciting, where everyone is the coolest person ever and we'll all be BFF. The cycle begins anew.

It's been interesting reading other friend's comments about the evolutions of various communities and thinking, "yup, been there. the next step will probably be X."

Looking back, as trying as times could be at the Bronze--particularly around posting board party time--we were a pretty healthy community. Passionate and fighty and touchy sometimes, but somehow there was also a lot of humor and wit to take us through many of the dark times. Or maybe I'm just looking back through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia.

Comments

[mediumdave.livejournal.com]

The whole Ms Scribe affair has been weird for me, personally, because I was starting to become acquainted with some of the people involved (such as angua9). All of a sudden they started talking about this long-standing feud that I knew nothing about, and until I read the "Charlotte Lennox" journal I was pretty confused.

I was aware of Fandom_Scruples before, because "his" posts had been featured on Fandom_Wank, but at the time I thought FS sounded just like one of the hundreds of self-righteous gits that one encounters in fandom. It was quite a surprise to find out that "he" was probably one of Ms Scribe's socks. I could partly blame that on my ignorance of the world of Potter fic, but I do have some grudging admiration for the way that Ms Scribe nailed the tone of your typical self-righteous git so perfectly.

Because of the way that the WB Bronze and the Bronze Beta displayed IP addresses, it would've been difficult to wage a sockpuppet campaign of that type there, but I remember speculations here and there about "ringers" trying to discredit one faction or another by pretending to be one of them (e.g., a Kitten pretending to be a homophobe). And of course there was the "Penlind" saga, which is fascinating in its own right.

[suzannemarie.livejournal.com]

Penlind came to mind a couple of times in the course of reading the saga. I suppose it's inevitable that the users of the world will make their appearance in every community.

I, too, can't help but have a little admiration for the manipulative, puppetmaster skills of some of the people that pop up from time to time. It's an intriguing thing to observe, though I just can't relate to the type of person that engages in that sort of behavior.